Time for another Quicksilver quickie (sorry, couldn’t help myself ). I mean, time for another Quicksilver short tutorial. If you haven’t read yet the other tutorials in my blog, I recommend you: Quicksilver: instantly create text files and prepend or append text to them, Quicksilver – blogging with wordpress by email, or the very simple and effective Quicksilver – how to send emails.

If you are like the average Mac user, you think Quicksilver is only an application launcher. To some extent, this is true, it is a very good application launcher. But it does much more than that. Enourmously much more than that. Basically, Quicksilver can become your fastest channel to your activity. It will let you instantly access all your informations, and it will change the way you look at the computer.

The initial, generally accepted, computer usage paradigm is:

1. Chose your information management program (documents, images, contacts, web pages, emails, you name it).
2. Open that program.
3. Find the info you need by using that program.
4. Close the program.

Quicksilver makes it like this:

1. Search the info you need.
2. Use it.

Today will talk about finding address book contacts, one of the most frequent computer activities. Just fire up your Quicksilver combination, usually CTRL + Space and then type the first letters of the contact you need to find. In my case, this is exactly me (I get narcisistic from time to time…):

Quicksilver instantly find your contact. Yes, it’s that simple. Sorry if you looked for something more complicated, that’s all, folks… You just have the needed contact instantly, at ease, and without actually opening the Address Book application.

But you can do more with Quicksilver (this seems to be like a brand tag for Quicksilver: wait, there’s more…). Well, you can:

• Show the contact info in Quicksilver
• Add a note to it in Quicksilver
• Edit it in Address Book

If you chose to add a note to the contact, you’ll do it from within Quicksilver, in its own text input pane:

If you chose to edit the contact, the Address Book application will open in edit mode, with the selected contact preloaded.

Addres Book search from Quicksilver has proven a massive time saver for me. Try it for yourself, it’s only several keystrokes far from you .